Andrew Haglund

Moving to Micro.blog

After months of listening to Manton Reece on Core Intuition I’ve decided to move to Micro.blog. My domain name will carry on but I’m not 100% sure if my RSS feed will transition gracefully? 🤷 Worst case I’ll let all 12 of you know with a final post in this feed.1

My current site is built with Eleventy and while I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning web development and entering the world of static site generators, I find there’s just too much friction with writing new posts — especially from my phone.2 It’s enough friction where I tend to just post to Mastodon or sit on a pile of unused ideas for months.

In this process I’ve learned that I enjoy writing. I like even more that I’m writing at a domain and site I control — not some out-of-his-mind billionaire. What drew me to Eleventy was the idea that I could mooch indefinitely off of GitHub pages (free!) and only pay for my domain renewal fees. Unfortunately the convenience is just not there.

Enter Micro.blog which hosts your site, lets you blog, cross-post to Threads and Mastodon (and others), and podcast hosting (you never know!) for $5/mo. I always have this fear of thinking of monthly costs for my website, which often goes like this:

If I want to have a website my whole life that’s… hmm let me do the math… $5 × 12 months per year × 90 years. Shit.

But the reality is that $5/mo is, at least for most people, nothing. This is “cup of coffee” territory.

Micro.blog also has a social aspect, but without all the algorithms and engagement bait that makes using Threads or certain unnamed sites such a hellscape at times. I want to take this as an opportunity to rethink my relationship with social media more broadly.

I’m pumped to try Micro.blog and I can already tell I’m going to be a happy paying customer. We need more people like Manton building platforms based on the open web and I’m happy to support their work over there. Write on!

  1. This migration won’t happen right away. I’ll need some time to import my files and do DNS stuff. It’s not on the top of my to-do list. ↩︎

  2. While technically the process of publishing with Eleventy is simply dropping an md file from iA Writer or Drafts into GitHub with Working Copy, you gotta have the right front-matter in your file (which I automate in Drafts and Apple’s text replacement feature) and these types of tasks are just not conducive to the phone. ↩︎

© 2024 Andrew Haglund